Archi.ru: Please tell us more about the competition. According to recent practice, it was held without much publicity.
Sergey Oreshkin: I myself did not find out about this competition right away - yes, this is our Russian practice. But maybe it has its own reason, since an open competition gathers a crazy number of participants, and this is a very irrational waste of resources. Even for the most modest team, there are at least two architects who have to work for two months, plus software and so on. From the point of view of global resource savings, this is wrong. How to invite correctly is a difficult question. On the one hand, it is necessary to train young people, on the other hand, the process must be differentiated.
The path taken by the Glorex Development company is very civilized. The customer hired TOPMARK as an organizer and MARSH as a consultant, and these are all well-known names - for example, Evgeny Ass consulted from MARSH; Elena Gonzalez was a curator from MARSH Lab.
Urban planning active and well-established companies were invited to participate, from Russian companies - Ostozhenka, Studio-44 and we. We all constantly meet at competitions of different levels and run a lot of objects. About myself I can say that over the past 10 years, according to our projects, about 450,000 m2 have been built and commissioned.2 housing, is being built and designed now almost 1,000,000m2 housing, even more concepts were made - we do not even show everything, and here we, as they say, “got our hands on” well.
We were invited already at the second stage, when they suddenly remembered that our company had designed many objects on the reclamation - this is the port (
sea cruise terminal - the largest in Europe), and residential complex "Ya-Romantic", and the water park of the hotel "Pribaltiyskaya", and the Pugacheva theater together with the London bureau "POPULOUS". In addition, this year we have won several urban planning competitions and have just won the international competition for the five-star "Radisson Blu Moscow Riverside Hotel & SPA" - probably this information has also become known to the organizers.
Western bureaus were not chosen by chance either. Chinno Dzucchi is known as a creative architect, despite the fact that in Italy it is generally difficult to grow to a noticeable size, since there are 10 times more architects there than in Russia. Dzucchi showed a truly Italian project - with his own understanding of the quality and comfort of living space, while subtly reminiscent of sunny Italy from the perspectives.
KCAP has extensive urban planning practice and extensive experience in Russia. They have developed, in particular, the concept of the development of the Perm agglomeration - a gigantic work.
The only truly world-famous company was Snohetta, their participation was a huge incentive for us to work for maximum results.
Was the competition an initiative of the customer, or was it a recommendation from the city?
S. O.: The competition was initiated by the customer, Glorex Development, plus the impulse came from the chief architect of St. Petersburg, Vladimir Grigoriev.
In my opinion, we are following the path of Moscow, where for several years, on the initiative of the chief architect of Moscow, Sergei Kuznetsov, architectural competitions have been regularly held, attracting interesting teams of participants.
Such competitions bring a very important thing into our practice: the need to study the building to the details. Western architects have a very big advantage over us because of our Soviet “loop”, when the depth of development of design documentation was negligible. If you look at the current GOST (in fact, still Soviet), then it prescribes the most superficial scope of design study: a parapet assembly, a base / plinth assembly and something else, but the boundaries to which the working project should be worked out are not defined. In Russia, this is always the ground for conflict between the client and the architect. If we have three stages of volumetric design and two urban planning, then around the world there are from eight to fourteen, of which four are only preparatory. Hopefully, thanks to integration, we will be able to gradually bridge this gap.
Have the customer voiced any figurative preferences? Some of the participants, including you, use images of waves and sails, although in general bionics are not typical for you …
S. O.: There was no question of style at all. Only the most general wishes were expressed: to have a feeling of the seafront, wind, travel, freedom … To one degree or another, everyone tried to reflect this. Unless, Nikita Yavein put forward an excellent idea for a theatrical production: the windows of his business center are conceived as "televisions" in which people would look at the arriving ships. There is always theater, experiment in his works.
Alexander Skokan reflected the theme of St. Petersburg in his own way, tying his modules to the height of the eaves of the Winter Palace and the rhythm of the Palace Embankment. "Snohetta" used the image of an iceberg as a generalized symbol of the northern sea.
Our imaginative line includes, first of all, the image of the wind. I started from the images of the Gulf of Finland, which are associated with vivid childhood memories: Zelenogorsk, Solnechnoye, clean sand, sparkling ripples, warm shallow water. But our main leitmotif was the search for a clean "skyline" of the sea façade of the alluvium by analogy with the famous "skyline" of the city's main embankments. If you construct the virtual contours of the silhouettes of buildings along the streets adjacent to the embankments of the Bolshaya Neva, it turns out that these silhouettes are extremely organic and carry a very interesting aesthetics. Taking into account modern 3-D technologies, these silhouettes can be connected in the heavenly planes - "envelopes", which we did on the basis of the calculated modules for the development of Vasilievsky Island. The sky planes created unique silhouettes for all the streets of our project, moreover: since this is a three-dimensional 3-D design, all micro-blocks are connected to each other by a common line of cornices.
As for bionics, we always have a struggle between imagery and rationalism. In fact, we have repeatedly turned to bionics, although these projects were not shown especially: at city councils this is usually poorly perceived. But in this case, it was necessary to sacrifice a little functionality in favor of the image. Another thing is that at first we still deduced a technical basis: what kind of housing should be, how it should be sold, etc. And then they looked for and calculated the angle of inclination of the roofs. To do this, we, as I said, “covered the entire Vasilievsky Island with a virtual blanket,” which gave us the scale of this wave.
On Vasilievsky Island, there are several development zones of different scales: the northeastern part according to Trezzini's design, Lenproekt's development of the Smolenka River, the coastal quarter of Evgeny Gerasimov, the buildings of Ivan Fomin in the 1910s … As a result, during the calculations, we got an average scale. Only a little time was not enough to figuratively "blow up" all this.
We also wanted to somehow hint that St. Petersburg is still a trading city, and these are always red-brick warehouses. Hooks always hung on the facades in Amsterdam: when the ship approached, the owner sat downstairs and negotiated, and the bales were immediately lowered on the winch - that is, the trade was perfected. I would like to reflect this element of the trade and port city. Hence the dark brick buildings with truncated corners are business centers, and the housing is all white and light.
All projects had bright ideas, including ours. All participants experimented, all took risks, and I cannot say that some project did not work out. No, all the works were good, strong, and as they said at the post-competition conference, there was no significant difference in the quality and level of works.
Did the general plan of Gensler interfere with you?
S. O.: On closer examination, the master plan of the American firm "Gensler", created in 2006 for the alluvium, turns out to be not as absurd as at first glance. Since we seriously studied this territory, we found out that all the radii were drawn from meaningful, not random points. The members of the expert council, who discussed this master plan at one time, also say that there was nothing formally to complain about. Perhaps the most serious point is engineering networks, which “do not like” sharp corners, since this requires serious additional capacities. There are huge unnecessary expenses here, which will become clear in the future.
How will your cooperation with the KCAP + Orange consortium develop?
S. O.: Our team is supposed to be the consortium project adapter "KCAP + Orange". We also work at the European level, which will probably surprise the customer. Before the sanctions, our technical equipment was even better than that of many Western colleagues, since, unlike a number of companies, we changed the software every year. Now we cannot afford it, so the situation is leveling off.
The experience of the consortium will definitely be taken "KCAP + Orange", their focus on creating a comfortable environment, but what they showed specifically requires a serious rethinking in terms of design boundaries. Formally, it is quite difficult to go beyond the boundaries of the site, change the contours of the embankments and make canals, although today it is technically possible to provide an acceptable watercourse in the new canals.
You should definitely use their idea of spiers - that's great. Channels are also a good idea if you can do it technically.
A separate topic is the solution of the embankment: serious work is required here, coordination with the designers of other sections and linking to the existing embankments.
I think that within the framework of one general urban planning theme, it is necessary to involve different architects in the work. This practice has developed today in Moscow - for example, on the territory of ZIL. Personally, after passing the urban planning phase, I would attract different architects who are close in spirit and are ready to work within the framework of the general architectural regulations both in style and in the material of the facades. This idea was also voiced by the chief architect of St. Petersburg, Vladimir Grigoriev.
When large complexes are built up with one hand, there is a feeling of loss of environment everywhere. In particular, modern "one-hand" neighborhoods over 100,000m2 squares turn out to be both urban planning and artistically deprived of architectural attention.
What is the schedule for this project?
S. O.: There are no specific dates yet, but the customer is determined to do serious work in St. Petersburg. This can be judged at least by the fact that Glorex Development is starting several projects in St. Petersburg, each being developed with the participation of well-known architectural firms, despite the fact that some of the projects are, in fact, social in nature with practically no commercial profit.
On New Year's holidays, we will definitely have a rest, and then we will begin consultations.
